The Particulars of Ministry

At the suggestion of Kyle Childress, pastor of Austin Heights Baptist Church in Nacodoches, Texas, I've been reading Garret Keizer's book A Dresser of Sycamore Trees. It is a memoir of a lay Episcopal minister's journey with a small congregation in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. I'd really like some of my Vermont readers to tell me why the heck it took two years and a preacher from Texas to put me on to this book. I mean, come on people!

I'm enjoying the read. It is at times a little gushy and too liberal with words, but I am finding that Keizer's attention to the particulars of ministry is full of insight into the subtle and sometimes hidden forms grace takes in our lives. I suppose that pretty well somes up the art of the spiritual life - opening the eyes to see Christ in the most particular and inauspicious of encounters. Page one in Keizer's book says it all. He's talking about coming back from a visit with a parishioner's home. As he drives his mind floods with subtle images of the visit and suddenly becomes aware of how mercifully connected his life and the life of his parishioners are with all the rest of this God blessed world. In other words, he remembers:

The image of an old woman taking the wafer reverently in arthritic hands overwhelms me as I round a mountain and the full moon appears blessing the branches of a great dead elm. The ionosphere has come down in the night, like St. Peter's visionary sheetful of clean and unclean animals, and my car radio isa feast of stations . . . I give thanks for my family, my church, the Supremes. Next week, without fail, I will stop at the farm which it is too late to visit now, but passing by I pray for the family who live there. I pray for their cows and the land. And I tell myself by way of exultation what I now tell my reader by way of warning, it won't get much better than this.

It won't get much better because being alive to the subtle sacraments of life, those crevices through which heaven's light breaks in, is what life and ministry and Keizer's book are about. It doesn't get much better than that because that's pretty much the best life has to offer anyway.

I listened to Ken Burns give an address tonight and he pretty much said the same thing. He said the way he goes about history is to look for the universal through the insights of the particular. He even used religious imagery. "What is true below, is true above," he said. Then he quoted Blake who wrote of seeing "the world in a grain of sand." And, of course, Blake got that from a certain Jewish rabbi who talked of seeing the kingdom of God in a mustard seed.

Our world is addicted to dazzle. If it doesn't blow our socks off then it isn't worth it. If it doesn't blow our socks off then we'll never even notice it.

But the kingdom of God . . .the kingdom of God is among us. Hidden, like a treasure in the field. Hidden in the tiniest of particular acts, where God speaks in subtle whispers. Tiny whispers that only those with ears to hear can discern.

Over the next couple of weeks I'm going to try and write about a few of those tiny acts that I have been graced to be a part of. Pray for me, that like Keizer, I too will remember well.

Getting Gas

I haven't been a good blogger lately. I've been really distracted by a lot of stuff and, frankly, have been on E ever since I returned from the break.

When I was 21 my grandparents picked me up in Colorado, where I was spending the summer guiding backpacking trips, and we drove to see my uncle and aunt in Cody, Wyoming. My grandparents bickered almost the whole way there and all the way back and so most of the ride was sort of colored by their domestic complications.

But one other thing from the ride stands out also. My grandfather never let the fuel get lower than half a tank. "Remember this Ryon," he said, as if about to pass on some very important key to life, "you can go just as far on full tank of gas as you can on a half."

It was his dry, riddling cowboy way of saying, "Get gas while you still can."

I suppose that's the point of keeping Sabbath. Getting gas while we still can before we run so completely dry that we can't make it another mile.

On Being Seen at South Plains Mall

A couple of days after Christmas Irie and I took some of the money we got from my family and went down to Dillard’s department store for shoes. Dillard's is in South Plains Mall, and my favorite hangout from sixth through eighth grades. I loved it because there was no telling who you might run into there. It was all about seeing and being seen. Plus, SPM holds the unsubstantiated claim to being the world's largest one story shopping mall, which really doesn't make sense since a lot of stores there have more than one story. But anyway:

The lady who waited on us at Dillard's was real cordial but I could tell we interested her a great deal. As we were paying out she finally had to ask. “Where are ya’ll from,” she said. I told her that I was born in Lubbock but that we live in Vermont now.

Now most people when you tell them where you live will ask how you like it, what the people are like and so forth. Not this lady. When I told her we live in Vermont her immediate response was, “Don’t ya’ll just want to get back to Texas?”

“Well, not really,” I said.

“You don’t?”

The idea that life might actually exist beyond the Arkansas River seemed unbelievable to this woman. The chat continued on. She asked what I do in Vermont. I told her I am an American Baptist pastor. She had never heard of American Baptists.

“Is that like Southern Baptist?” she asked.

“Yeah, sort of,” I said.

She seemed incredulous.

“Same God? Same Jesus?”

“Yes, same God. Same Jesus.”

I read her eyes. They were saying, “Mr., are you telling me that not all Christians are Texans?” I was telling her even more than that. I was telling her not even all Baptists are Texans.

This news had her flipping out. Overcome with joy at just the thought of it all.

As we were leaving she yelled after us. “We’ll see each other again!”

Irie and I made our way past cosmetics and through the juniors section toward the door and then ran right into my high school girlfriend. She and Irie had not met and things were a little surreal for a second.

None of us had imagined seeing each other with sweat suits on and sneaker boxes in hand. No one had a chance to look in the mirror or put on high heels. We were all just us and perhaps that was life's way of saying that everything is okay now, there is no need for pretense.

And there wasn't any need for pretense because everything was okay. After the nerves wore off for us all we talked about marriage and kids. She said her dad is sick with cancer. I said I was sorry to hear that and I was.

It was brief, but meaningful. Almost sacramental. I left Dillard's with the knowledge that God is redeeming us all, and certain that what the shoe lady said was Gospel truth:

We will all some day see each other again.

With a little help from. . .

Last week the oldest member of our church turned 95. I went over and saw him. He is still as sharp as a tack and rye as Irish whiskey.

"Ninety-five," I said, "You know, Abraham had a child at a hundred."

"Yeah," he said, "and he might of had a little help too."

I almost fell out of my chair. "Well, that's not quite the orthodox understanding of the story, but that is about the funniest thing I've ever heard," I said.

But I got to thinking about that. Wait a minute. He was exactly right. What he said was entirely orthodox. Abraham had a little help. In fact, he had a lot of help.

And I suppose that is the whole meaning of this story we are living into over these next few hours. We needed help. And God gave us a child.

Letting Tony Speak

You know that I was born to be a preacher because I actually like to listen to sermons. I’m hopeless I know. Sometimes I go to St. Mike’s where they have really fast internet connection, and I log in under my wife’s name and I just sit back and watch three or four sermons in a row.

A couple of weeks ago I was there listening to a guy named Tony Campolo preach. He was preaching at my alma mater Duke University and on vocational discernment Sunday there at Duke Chapel. He was telling all those Dukies how they ought not to waste their lives. He was telling them that the world tells them to go to school so they can get a good ____ so they can make a lot of _____ so they can buy a lot of ______. I’m listening to this sermon and I look around and notice that I’m surrounded by college students who are all studying for finals so they can get out and get a good job and make a lot of money and buy a lot of stuff. So I think, Man, I’m need to pray for these cats. So I start praying for everyone in the room as I continue listening. And then I hear Tony tell a story. He used to be a college professor and he had one young student come up to him and tell him how proud she was because out of like 90 candidates she had landed this job. Tony heard that and looked that girl right in the eyes, and said, “That’s terrible. Why go somewhere you’re not needed when you could go somewhere you’re desperately needed? He told her last year there were something like 200 teacher vacancies in the city of Philadelphia alone why not go there and make a difference instead of going somewhere else to make a dollar?

So as I’m listening to this and looking at all these college kids surrounding me my heart starts pounding and I decide its not enough for me to pray for them; they gotta here this. It’s dead quiet in the computer cluster so I hit the volume button all the way up and then bring it back down like I’m having technical difficulties. But the truth is I’m trying to get their attention. Then, having gotten their attention, I start bringing that volume back real slow like and I start letting Tony preach to these people. And one girl keeps looking over at me. And I know she’s not studying to make a lot of money but wants to become a librarian, because she keeps giving me that irritated librarian face. “SSHH.”

Patron Saint

On Thanksgiving I obscurely gave thanks for the Rev. A. Ritchie Low. Here's why:


Most Baptists don't have patron saints, but maybe that is because they just haven't found there's yet.

I've found mine. His name is Rev. A. Ritchie Low.

I discovered Ritchie Low when I was researching former ministers of the church where I am now pastor. There were funny stories about a number of ministers - one whose "sermons were hortatory" but who was better remembered for his wife's culinary skills, his love of a fast horse and the "glop of a clambake he proposed." The story on Ritchie Low, pastor of the United Church of Colchester from 1927-1933, was equally anecdotal, replete with stories of erratic and dangerous driving through the backroads of rural Vermont.

The usual stuff you find in church histories. Nothing to get too excited about. But then this one line stuck out. During his tenure he "began working out plans for interracial fellowship at the child level." Plans for interracial fellowship in the early 30s? In Colchester, Vermont of all places?

When I was installed as pastor I told the congregation that I had no idea what interracial fellowship at the child level would have meant in this part of the country at that time. But, I said, "one of these days my wife Irie and I are going to have a child, and Ritchie Low's plans will come to fruition. You will have interracial fellowship a the child level every Sunday." We do now. On March 28 of last year Irie and I had our first child, Gabrielle Zipporah Price, the bi-racial child of a white man and a black woman.

If the story had ended there it would have been a pretty good one. But it didn't end there and is now becoming a great story.

I put Ritchie Low on the backburner for about a year but not long ago I was reading a history of race relations in Vermont and lo and behold there is a minister from the United Church of Johnson, VT who in the 1930s helped to integrate the major downtown Burlington, VT hotel. I knew then there is a story that needed to be told about Ritchie Low.

In 1943 Rev. Low traveled from Johnson, VT down to Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. There he stayed in the home of Adam Clayton, Powell, Jr. and upon his return began the Vermont-Harlem Project which would bring over 100 Harlem children to Vermont during the summers of 1943 and 44. This was a project aimed explicitly at bringing blacks and whites together. In an article in the 1946 summer issue of Common Ground Rev. Low wrote:


These were not underprivileged boys and girls in the usual sense of the word. They were coming as representatives of the thirteen million colored people of America. They were coming as friends, as ambassadors of goodwill. They were coming to the Green Mountains so that we might get to know them and, through them, their race.


The Harlem-Vermont Project made headlines throughout the nation and brought Rev. Low considerable attention. One quote from a Time Magazine article from August 28, 1944 was especially prescient for the day: "The Negro is not a problem to be solved but a human being to be understood."

Rev. Low continued his work at improving race relations in America before his untimely death on Christmas Eve 1948. He even traveled to the South as a part of a vanguard of civil rights activists, gathering information and encouraging blacks to organize for equality. In an article he wrote for the Christian Century titled "Zigzagging through Dixie" he wrote of the trouble he caused when he decided to sit at with the blacks on the back of the bus in Savannah. In that article he also described the inherent disparities between blacks and whites in the Jim Crow South.

I have to confess that I feel very connected to the Rev. Ritchie Low in a very mystical kind of way. Two white pastors, the same small Vermont church, both our lives surprisingly bound up with the story of race in America. The world outside the church would call it ironic. But inside the church we have an even better term for it I think. The communion of saints. That sounds right even to my Baptist ears. Perhaps it should not be too much of a surprise that Rev. Low began his tenure here at the United Church of Colchester on the first day of November - All Saints Day.

The thing is almost nobody has ever heard of Ritchie Low or the United Churches of Johnson and Colchester. And that's perhaps the whole point of the story. A guy from nowhere Vermont does some seemingly small, hidden act and it helps to change the world. It helps to change the way whites and blacks think about each other. It helps to change the laws so that a white man like me and a black woman like Irie can marry each other in the South. And it helps to change America so that wherever we bring our daughter Gabrielle there is interracial fellowship at the child level.

Amen.

Putting the (other) B in Baptist

When I was installed as pastor I asked one of the church pillars to say a few words. He told those gathered that I was teaching the congregation how to say Baptist like a Texan.

"Babtist," he said.

I didn't get it.

"Babtist," he said again.

Everyone was laughing, but I had no idea what was going on.

Finally he clued me in. "BaBtist. You say it with two Bs."

Things finally made sense for me a couple of weeks ago when I received a letter from my uncle down in Texas. The letter was addressed to:

The United Babtist Church

You can't make this stuff up.

Oh well, I borrowed a line from Stanley Hauerwas last Sunday and told the church that I'm proud of my accent. It is like my bellybutton; it reminds me that I came from somewhere.

Baptist and Blogger Part VII

Gil Gulick, a third year student at Wake Forest Divinity School is doing research on Baptist bloggers and the role of the blog in 21st century Baptist life. He solicited my help. I thought I would share my answers to his questions here with you. I think something profound is happening with blogs and I would be interested to read what Gil arrives at.

I'll do this in a series of installments. This is the seventh and final installment.



7. Historically, Baptists have been a people of dissent. How does blogging
fit into this idea and the Baptist idea of priesthood of the believer?

Like I said, this is a thoroughly democratized medium. Greg Horton of theparish is a great example of a guy who is writing honestly about faith and the struggle to live fully into Christ's claim on our lives. Greg probably wouldn't last very long in most traditional pulpits but his blog gives him a platform for all sorts of unchurched and outchurched folks to come and wrestle with God over his words. Blogs offer a counter to the neo-clericalism of our day which tries to determine who can and can't say something. If Roger Williams were alive today Rhode Island would be a blog. Heck, maybe it is. I'll Google that and see.

How This Plane and Ronald Reagan's Death Saved My Life (a non-substitutionary theory of atonement)

This is an excerpt from an email I recently wrote to a pastor I know in Texas. He is coming to Andover Newton in April to share thoughts about the future of preaching. He asked me to share some of my thoughts on the future of this calling and below is a portion of what I gave him.

As a nod to Stanley let me tell you my story. I graduated from Duke set on law school. I graduated with an MDiv but persuaded everyone at the local bar that I was studying "theology". That sounded vague, non-committal, and was served up nicely along with the third round of drinks. I could be anyone I pleased so long as Christianity was something I merely flirted with. A dilletante. Form but no soul.

So I moved to Washington, DC that summer because I landed a job interning for a congressman from my home district. And then Ronald Reagan died, which is actually strangely important to my story. Ronald Reagan died and all the dignitaries were flying in from all over the country and world, and one of them was the governor of Kentucky. He was flying in and somehow his private jet lost contact with the tower and ended up flying into protected airspace. The Capitol alarms went crazy and one of the staffers grabbed the emergency pack full of tylenol and bandaids and anti-anthrax syrum or whatever is in there and we were all off. Running down First St. trying to get as far away from the Capitol as possible because the #$%@ was about to hit the dome.

And that's when it all became clear. That's when Stanley through Yoder through Curtis Freeman all made sense. And it was terrifying. It was terrifying because I realized that I am baptized and because I am baptized my life is not my own and because my life is not my own I didn't want to die doing something I really didn't believe in.

So that's when I called back to North Carolina and I asked to have my youth director back at podunk, nobody ever heard of it, Lowe's Grove Baptist Church. Youth director! Not even minister of youth. Not even youth pastor. Youth director! And then I went back and Lord have mercy I moved in with an octogenarian from that church. An eighty something year old man with wax in his ears and dreams of his deceased wife at night.

And you know what God said, "It is good. It is very good."

Baptist and Blogger Part VI

Gil Gulick, a third year student at Wake Forest Divinity School is doing research on Baptist bloggers and the role of the blog in 21st century Baptist life. He solicited my help. I thought I would share my answers to his questions here with you. I think something profound is happening with blogs and I would be interested to read what Gil arrives at.

I'll do this in a series of installments. This is the sixth installment.


6. How do you handle comments on your blog? If you allow them, do you
screen them first? If so, what do you screen for? If you do not allow
comments, why not?

Any hurtful, blasphemous, incriminating, or otherwise inane comments get the boot. Commenters are my guests. No one should have to tolerate having grenades lobbed in from someone bent on destruction.

Judas Iscariot

April Deconick, professor of Biblical Studies at Rice University, has a very provocative op-ed piece on the Gospel of Judas in today's New York Times.

Last year the National Geographic Society said they had found and translated the 3rd century book and - much to people's shock and others' delight - the story had Jesus inducing his betrayal by Judas. Deconick, however, says that was all wrong. She says that the National Geographic Society's translators consistently made some very errant choices in translation which ended in that interpretation. An example: The Greek word "daimon" is usually translated demon into English. But Deconick says the translators instead made the unusual decision to intepret the word daimon as spirit in reference to Judas.

I suspect the debate will go on for years about what is the right reading of the Gospel of Judas. But Deconick makes a solid point when she questions National Geographic Society's choice not to open up discussion of the text more fully before they printed their article last year.

Deconik posits that perhaps the interpretive choices were inspired by a desire to reconcile Christians and Jews. Throughout the centuries Christians have wrongly painted Judas as an allegorical figure for the entire Jewish nation. Deconick suggests that in order to challenge the antisemitic reading of Judas,the National Geographic Society translators might have been too willing to problematize the Judas character.

If Deconik is right about the errant interpretative decisions I think there are less noble motives at work. In this new age of journalism even a respectable journal like National Geographic is under increasing pressure to get readers. Nothing gets readers like salacious stories that challenge the orthodox story of Judas' betrayal.

But here is the thing. It doesn't really matter if this good Judas myth began in the 1st or 3rd or 21st century. Both the orthodox and apocryphal gospels have Jesus knowing that he is going to be betrayed by Judas. And if there is betrayal then there is violation of trust. And that's why when Jesus said to Judas, "Do what you are going to do," there must have been a terrible sadness in his heart. For Judas and for all of us.

Baptist & Blogger Part V

Gil Gulick, a third year student at Wake Forest Divinity School is doing research on Baptist bloggers and the role of the blog in 21st century Baptist life. He solicited my help. I thought I would share my answers to his questions here with you. I think something profound is happening with blogs and I would be interested to read what Gil arrives at.

I'll do this in a series of installments. This is the fifth installment.

5. What, if any, opposition have you encountered to your blogging?

I think that some people are just wired to come looking at your blog for evidence. They're like the forensics team. If they think you did something, they come looking for evidence. I once interviewed for a youth ministry position down in Texas. Word got back to me that one of the people read my blog and didn't like what he saw. But the truth is he met me and didn't like what he saw, then he went to my blog to justify his reasoning. In seminary we called it proof texting.

Baptist & Blogger Part IV

Gil Gulick, a third year student at Wake Forest Divinity School is doing research on Baptist bloggers and the role of the blog in 21st century Baptist life. He solicited my help. I thought I would share my answers to his questions here with you. I think something profound is happening with blogs and I would be interested to read what Gil arrives at.

I'll do this in a series of installments. This is the fourth installment.

4. What are the positives and negatives of blogging?

I think the most positive thing is that this is a thoroughly democratized medium. If you write well and connect with people at a soul level then you will get discovered. The cream naturally rises to the top in the blogosphere.

The downside is that in this medium you really do need to write a lot. There's no room for sometimes bloggers. This means a lot of ideas aren't as fleshed out as they deserve to be. It also means that some ideas that ought never to be seen by anyone make their way into perpetuity. Thomas Merton and his editors would be appalled.

Having the poor with us - ie, Jesus' words are for me

I said something in my last post about using Jesus' words about always having the poor with us. I called it a cop out.

It's actually more than that even. It is a fundamental misunderstanding of the context in which Jesus spoke those words.

A woman came to anoint Jesus with alabaster. Some of the disciples grumbled. "We could have sold that and given it to the poor." What the disciples don't get - because they can't get it through their skulls that the Messiah is going to be killed - is that this is a burial annointing. Jesus corrects them. "The poor you will always have with you, but not me."

Most of those around the table would have heard that and known that Jesus was putting a twist on Deuteronomy 15. "...there will, however, be no poor among you, because the Lord is sure to bless you in the land that the Lord of God is giving you...if only you will obey the Lord your God..." In his book Jesus, Justice, and the Reign of God Bill Herzog says that the only logical conclusion we can draw from Jesus' statement is that poverty exists among us because people don't obey God. Herzog writes, "Far from being a saying about the prevalence of the poor, it is a wry saying about the omnipresence of oppression and explotation." We always have the poor among us because in a game of winners there are going to be losers.

But here's where things hit home for me. When Jesus says you can always give to the poor he ain't talking to the Herods of this earth. He's talking to a bunch scruffy-faced, corn-footed, fishermen-turned-itinerate-preachers. And that's the rub for us not destitute but definitely not rich folks. We do always have an abundance out of which we could give to the poor.

That's why I'm taking one of my extra snow coat to JUMP today. Because Jesus' words are for me.

Problematizing "Help"

I find this article about foodbanks in the US from the Washington Post at the breadblog.

The article raises all kinds of provocative questions about the way we go about combating hunger here in America. You read something like this and you are to grow pessimistic and write off doing anything with cop out of the ages - "Afterall, Jesus said we'd always have the poor with us."

Here's the thing. We're not going to solve hunger by building more food pantries (though we may need more food pantries to help stop the bleeding). What we really need to do every Thanksgiving is start introducing all those good folks who come downtown to help serve the poor to John. By John I mean the poor guy at the table who actually has a name and a story. Instead of just doling out a 1/8 scoop of stuffing on John's table, those good-hearted volunteers ought to be challenged to start sharing in his story.

That's why I love what Hal Colston is doing with Neighborkeepers here in Vermont. Hal is trying to connect people to people, because in the end it is going to be relationships that help people get people out of poverty.

Baptist & Blogger Part III

Gil Gulick, a third year student at Wake Forest Divinity School is doing research on Baptist bloggers and the role of the blog in 21st century Baptist life. He solicited my help. I thought I would share my answers to his questions here with you. I think something profound is happening with blogs and I would be interested to read what Gil arrives at.

I'll do this in a series of installments. This is the third insallment.

3. What do you think the biggest impact of your blog has been?

Two things. First, through my own story I've been able to invite a lot of white religious folk who don't normally think about race to begin doing so - especially in the context of what Jesus has done and is doing to reconcile the world.

Second, I've been able to connect with a lot of secular folks and offer them a picture of Jesus that is open-minded, yet viscerally compelling. For example, just last week Philip Baruth of vermontdailybriefing discovered that I had linked to his blog. He looked me up and then interviewed me on his blog. Pretty cool. Beyond all the crap we see coming from the mouths of too many churchpeople, the essential message is powerful enough to change our hearts and our world - there is more life in Jesus Christ than there is death in us. I consider it a real privelege to share that news here with whatever stranger cares to listen.

Baptist & Blogger Part II

Gil Gulick, a third year student at Wake Forest Divinity School is doing research on Baptist bloggers and the role of the blog in 21st century Baptist life. He solicited my help. I thought I would share my answers to his questions here with you. I think something profound is happening with blogs and I would be interested to read what Gil arrives at.

I'll do this in a series of installments. This is the second installment.

2. If you are a pastor of a church, how has your congregation responded to your blog?

I don't get a lot of feedback from parishioners. I know I have some lurkers from among my congregation but most of the people who read my blog are from elsewhere. It is a kind of second pulpit for me. I get to be pastor for a lot of people from my past and some folks I've never even met before. It's a kind of communing of saints beyond time and space. Nevertheless, I recognize that what I say at fromthewilderness does not belong to me alone. I am a pastor of a church and don't have the luxury of taking that hat off to speak as someone unconnected to the Body of Christ. So I'm careful.

Giving Thanks

What I am giving thanks for today:

1. Kindred Spirits with which to travel
2. Unkindred Spirits to teach me about hospitality
3. Irie & Gabs & the gift of love which, if not a proof, is at least a strong sign that God exists
4. A. Ritiche Low & other unsung saints who have traveled before us and changed the world in small but very meaningful ways
5. the mariacchi band that played at our wedding reception
6. the grace to write meaningfully
7. completion

Baptist & Blogger Part I

Gil Gulick, a third year student at Wake Forest Divinity School is doing research on Baptist bloggers and the role of the blog in 21st century Baptist life. He solicited my help. I thought I would share my answers to his questions here with you. I think something profound is happening with blogs and I would be interested to read what Gil arrives at.

I'll do this in a series of installments.

1. When did you start blogging and why?

I began blogging in 2005 right when reallivepreacher was being unmasked. I read his blog a lot and found the level of candor and depth with which he was writing to be really inspiring. I had graduated from divinity school a year before and was serving as a youth minister at a small Baptist church. The conversations I was having with my youth group were good, but I was longing for more. Plus, I had always enjoyed the heck out of writing and was looking for a forum to get some of my thoughts out into the public space. The religious writing world has high walls you have to scale - like pastoring a church of some significant size or name. Blogging was my way of sneaking through the backdoor. That may sound arrogant or pretentious - I have something to say that people ought to hear - but I don't think so. God created me to tell stories. I wouldn't be happy doing anything else.

White on Black

Yesterday Irie and I pulled out of the driveway and much to our surprise saw police officers walking up and down our street, some of them taking pictures. They were gathering evidence. Under the cover of darkness someone had taken a can of spray paint and used it to graffiti several hateful words and pictures on various parts of our block. The city of Winooski just repaved our street last month so the symbolism of the bold white paint burned into the black asphault of Hickok St. was unmistakable. The N-Word. Then two doors down from that more hatred. "Kill all Bosnians". At first I just shook my head in sadness. Then, after fifteen or twenty seconds my belly literally started to turn hot. It was as if all the evil and hate of those words had entered my body, settled down into the pit of my stomach and then brewed. I began to fume. I drove around the block three times, looking for someone with a guilty grin. I wanted to beat the hell out of someone.

And then after a little while I remembered that you can't beat the hell out of anyone. You have to love the hell out of them. Which is the hardest thing to do in the world.

This coming Sunday the lectionary reading is from the twenty-third chapter of Saint Luke. I don't know if a word from God has ever spoke more timely or meaningfully or directly to me. "Father forgive them, for they know not what they do."

That is my prayer. I ask all those who read this to pray it with me. Pray it for me.

The thing that sickens and saddens me the most is that as I am reading this trash the first thing I think of is my Gabs all settled in innocently in the backseat without the feintest idea of the kind of world that she has been born into. The kind of world we chose to bring her into. I am so sorry for that and wish that I could protect her. But I can't. I can only do what I did tonight. I took her into my arms and bless her eyes for the things she will see.